I began to be sorry for myself, and at first I used my surroundings as scapegoat for my mood. How had I let myself fall into such squalid circumstances? My bedroll was infested with crawling insects, which had come to succulent me from the hard-sinewed trackers, for their sleeping-mats lay all around my narrow share of deck. By night, when the procession of crawling things headed toward the new paradise I offered them, I was surrounded and kept awake by the tempests of the trackers’ sleeping. In their soreness they snored and groaned, and they had active, twitching dreams, like dogs dozing by a hearth. Some had scabby crowns, some had sores on their legs. I itched constantly and imagined myself tainted and befouled, a piebald of ringworm and impetigo and white fungus. How I longed to lie in a porcelain tub in a white-tiled room, deep in the slickness of soap suds! Here instead I lay, flea-bitten, with beast-men for companions, tormented (most squalid thing of all) by want of the company of a girl who was herself, no doubt, lousy and unwashed, but who had such penetrating eyes, and such a tragic mouth, and such a mind for lyrics of the river, and such a memory for noble antiquities, in which men were brave, self-sacrificing, inexhaustibly generous, yet also cruel to death!

At last I was beginning, I suppose, to be more honest with myself. I think I had not realized in my conscious mind how deeply stirred I had been by this simple river woman in the days of my getting well, and so I had not been able, either, to foretell the effect on me of seeing in her eyes that she had lost her heart hopelessly to the singer on the towline. Of course this was why I was so uneasy and bored and angry with my lot.

As soon as all this came out openly into my mind I felt for some reason much better and I fell asleep….

A gentle hand on my shoulder woke me. I rolled over into the world. Su-ling was above me. I was very happy. I thought at first it was morning. I suppose only a few minutes had passed.

“What did you want?” Su-ling asked me; I dimly felt that she seemed hurried and brusque.

“I fell asleep,” I said, stretching.

“You are as soft as a bean curd,” she said, squatting on the deck under the archway near me. “What did you want?”

“I wanted to talk,” I said. I sat up. My boredom and disgust had made me bold, and I said, “I wanted to know about you.”

“I do what I have to do,” she said.

“What kind of a life do you have?” I asked with a touch of scorn.

“I do what I have to do,” Su-ling said again, and there was an insistent note of pride in her repeated words.